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YAPC::EU 2011 in Riga

I liked everything, to start with Riga itself – it’s really beautiful and green city – the venue (although the contrast between the main auditory and other rooms was big) and the food, ending on the conference and its atmosphere and content. Since I went to give my MIDI related talk, I was lucky enough to participate in the Speakers’ Workshop by Damian Conway & Alex Kapranov. It definitely helped me to improve my presentation and the talk itself.

There is a lot of new stuff happening in the Perl Community – the language constantly evolves and a lot of new ideas from Perl 6 are backported to Perl 5, what I really like. What I don’t like, though, is that some people are actively dissing Perl 6 as “completely different language, not Perl”. That’s not the disadvantage by itself; moreover, Perl community constantly borrow (steal?) ideas from other languages – some talks in Riga were good example of this, presenting cute ideas taken from Lisp and Haskell.

I can understand that Perl 6 may not appeal to some users of Perl 5. What I cannot understand, is that some notable members of Perl community spend their time & effort on explaining, why Perl 6 is not what should be called “the next step in the evolution of Perl 5” and by no means can be attached to the name of Perl. This actually harms the progress of all the work around Perl 6, slowing it down and bittering it needlessly.

However, in Riga yet again we were able to see that Perl 6 has no choice after Duke Nukem Forever was released… there were many talks about what can be already done in Perl 6, and what will be possible once it gets finished. To be fair I have to admit that the presentation from Jesse Vincent about Perl 5.16 also brought many new ideas (like differently “tailored” releases of next versions of Perl 5 and the backward compatibility controlled by use VERSION – to name a few).

I also met my friends from Poland and from Spain, and – what was a huge surprise for me – one of them decided to apply for job at Booking.com; few days ago he informed me, that he was accepted. Good luck, Quim!

And last but not least – I was able to spend a lot of time with some completely crazy Perl folks from the whole world. I will remember the party at the balcony of Getty’s room for a long time…